TEALT LEMAN: This is a discussion of the context we share and contest

     This is a love story, the story of my love for you, Gloria. Like all true love stories it is a special case involving everyone and everything as its real concern. Since I am one of the characters in the love story, I guess I should introduce myself. I am an anthropologist by training, a translator and English teacher by occupation and a nature worshipper by advocation. My perspective on existence is rather Jungian and assumes collective unconsciousness, karma, tantrism, some sort of reincarnation and a divine organizing principle to reality. I am also trained as a pamong (guide) in Sumarah, a Javanese mystic discipline based on relaxation, spontaneity and the accurate reception of reality.
     It seems like everytime I look, I'm going deeper and deeper into things I've never talked about with anyone with you. Believe me, if some if this material strikes you as strange, I'm as surprised to see it in print as you are. I never thought I would ever trust anyone enough to say some of the things that are here.
     In a way, my love for you developed here in Brazil. Since there is going to be a lot of material in this little work coming from places you've never been or probably even imagined, I'd like to start by taking a hard look at a familiar picture and giving you a chance to see how my mind works in an analytical and critical sense and the way I confront reality. So I will first present a brief picture of Brazil, a society I have come to see as a tangle of high and low spirits.

     To grasp this society in a general sense requires taking a good look at any particular moment because there is a good deal of truth in an old Brazilian joke about politicians: "The flies are different, but the shit remains the same." Most of this analysis came from December 1990, but, aside from some minor disappointments and corrections, nothing notable has changed.
     It's been an interesting year here in Brazil. The economic situation is kind of like when the beer runs out at a school party -- everything is just grinding to a halt. The firewater (aguardente) that had been sparking activity was monetary emission, the downside of which was inflation. The crimp on excess liquidity is bringing out all kinds of institutional structures that were based on inflation. For example, many businesses have gotten used to working with an operating deficit, counting on a financial profit coming from inflation to get them through (banking is probably the sector that is missing inflation and easy liquidity the most). In addition, there are basic market relations that have gotten badly distorted with all this inflation, like insurance brokers, who receive about a 3% commission in the international market but take in 45% here.
     Obviously, chronic inflation -- that reached something like 39,000,000% in the 1980s (inflation from January 1976 to August 1990 was 1,136,640,282%) -- was serving somebody's purposes. The more the new economic team stirs up this pile, though, the worse it smells, and the more people with enough power to really cause problems come slinking to the surface. For example, there is a group of parasites dubbed, "maharajas", who have used political or bureaucratic connections to get themselves cushy sinecures. In a country where the average annual income is about $2,000 and where a normal retirement check might come to $70 a month, one character managed to finagle a government retirement pension of almost $1,000,000 a year, and the only real work he did to get it was to exploit loopholes.
     Of course, somebody always pays for inflation. In Brazil the sectors that have been hurt the most are education and health and the lower income population. The group that has benefited is those who stand closest to the printing presses in one way or another. This bunch includes wealthy industrialists, bankers and speculators, who are quick to shift their money around in the unstable market (or ship it abroad when indicated), and those closely tied to the government's upper echelons, i.e., the political and bureaucratic elite. These guys have the ways and means for keeping up with and even setting the pace of inflation (there are industrial cartels and all manner of monopolistic holdings and the corruption that this implies).
     One result of this was a further distortion in income distribution during the 1980s, when the wealthiest 10% of the population's share of total income climbed from 46.6% to 53.2%, while the slice of the richest 1% grew from 13.4% to 17.3%. In fact, while income distribution reveals the good fortune of the upper crust in the 1980s, it does not capture the real societal distortions involved. This is because it does not reveal the element of accumulated wealth: some of the wealthy families have been in favored positions for many years, with their primary activity being to keep themselves there (one of my students terms these people "sharks"). I recall talking to one "coronel" from the Northeast (an almost feudal society) who reported to me as he was cleaning his gun that he was proud to be an "exploiter".
     Brazilian politicians frequently fall into this predatory class, and there are innumerable examples of the reek associated with their doings (their behavioral standards are low even compared with American politicians). The tradition of corruption in the federal government is stunning, but just to give a more modest example, in a new state that was formed two years ago, some of the state's fledgling legislators (who like most Brazilian congressmen generally have better things to do than attend congress) found that they had been voted out in this year's election, so they got together in the middle of the night and voted themselves a full pension based on their two-year term as pioneer lawmakers. Congressmen in Brazil often have higher salaries than those in the US. Since voting is obligatory, it comes as no surprise that in some states the number of voters who went in and doodled obscenities on their ballot (or just left them blank) exceeded the number of valid votes.
     This sense of scorn underlies a great deal of social interaction, being present even in the most mundane situations. For example, visitors to Brazil are invariably in for a shock when they answer the phone and the caller immediately demands, "Who is speaking?" Another trivial example comes from one of my neighbors who found some advertising leaflets littering the sidewalk out in front of his house. He picked up the papers and crumpled them up into a ball and, rather than putting them in the garbage, pointedly threw them out into the middle of the street. There's a vicious circle of ill will as people mutually mistrust and mistreat one another, a kind of pass-on-the-abuse chain reaction.
     One story that is accepted as obviously true (though I haven't tracked it down as yet) describes a rich young twit who was out racing about in the car his parents gave him for his birthday. He lost control, ran over and killed a person. The police brought him home crying: "Mother, Mother, I've had an accident and killed someone." "That's all right. Don't cry. We'll get you a new car." There is a whole series of popular homilies for these relational attitudes, e.g., "Take advantage", "Anything goes", and one I have frequently seen on bumper stickers that should replace "Ordém e Progresso" on the Brazilian flag:

     The societal result of all this institutional and interactive injustice is what might be called a "drowning swimmers syndrome", in which it is every man for himself in a singularly irresponsible and scofflaw fashion. Brazilian traffic witnesses to these attitudes: with less than one tenth the number of cars and a bit more than half the population, Brazil manages to produce just as many traffic fatalities as the US does. A recent poll of São Paulo drivers revealed that 63% of them routinely run red lights. Interestingly enough, in the contest for the world bad-driving championship, Brazilians' most serious competition comes from countries like the Russia, where there are a lot of the same social and political problems.
     In some ways São Paulo is just a poorer cousin of New York, and in fact, the Big Apple has so many of the same problems - political corruption, violence, capital outflow, an alienated population, etc. - that it seems like the two biggest differences might be New York's edge on organized crime, drugs and the existence of a semifunctional law enforcement system. As a result, New Yorkers are much more leery of one another; they give each other more room because they're afraid of getting bit. Paulistanos aren't. If somebody runs you over, don't expect any legal restitution - the law doesn't work here except to protect the interests of those with money, and often not even then. With the depressed wages of public employees, it has gotten like in the USSR, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."
     It is difficult not to get cynical about the Brazilian situation, but historically this is a rather common social period. One might well look to the rest of Latin America (especially Argentina and Peru) and Eastern Europe now to see similar tangles of structural, social, psychological and political irresponsibility and impunity, and it's not very different from the States around the turn of this Century: Boss Tweed and the muckrakers were expressions of the same kind of social mess.
     One factor compounding and aggravating this morass is the capital outflow that South America has been suffering since the early 1980s. This leeching of resources has undercut investment (especially public) and is probably responsible for some of the criminal aspect that is arising (notwithstanding the international trend, the boys from Medellin have invested pretty heavily here, though mostly as a transport route rather than for distribution so far).
     This is the context the new Brazilian government inherited when President Collor took office. In fact, his administration has made some progress, all things considered, in trying to bring the country down to earth. Surprisingly, he's not much of a populist: so far he's pushing for an economic reorganization and stabilization which is taking the economy into a recession. Not an easily palatable policy, but the basic direction is clearly what the economy and the society need. One thing that is still lacking is seeing some of the more brazen rascals thrown in jail (that'll be the day).
     The most damning criticism that can be leveled at Collor's stabilization plan (and it's very serious) is that government spending has not been cut enough and that the burden for the readjustment has been cast on the private sector. This is what has happened in the past as well and has traditionally meant that the Treasury's printing presses get called into overtime duty as soon as accounts go into the red; however, Collor has managed to cut more fiscal fat than any president in recent Brazilian history, so we just have to see if it's enough though the level of family and ingroup corruption in his administration reflects no change from recent history.
     One problem is that previous governments started waffling as soon as they began getting any serious negative feedback (especially from their friends and relations). In addition, they used and abused all the normal instruments that apply to such situations like price freezes and controls, social pacts, unkept promises of fiscal austerity, etc., and now nobody is interested in getting fooled again.
     In grading the stabilization plan, a former Minister of the Economy gave an 80% or 90% to the package itself, but said that administration was down under 50%. That's about it.
     Collor gets very good marks in ecology though, with a good program going on to control burning in the Amazon. In Indian affairs he would have gotten good grades if he had carried through on the educational measures offered but most of his promises have remained on paper. The Yanomami, a tribe that was threatened with genocide by an army of prospectors, have been helped by the destruction of many of the prospectors' airfields, but perhaps even more by the squeeze on liquidity that has depressed domestic gold prices. Collor's government has demonstrated some refreshing honesty and a fair amount of the same old me-first corruption. Nowadays it is hard to tell if the structural reforms involved in reducing the impact of the government on everyday life will be strong enough to make a difference or not.
     Brazil is a hard country to be pleased with, but at least, for the first time since I've been here, something positive and reality oriented seems to be going on it the government. The problem is that previous administrations had discovered that they could fool all the people all the time (as long as everybody thought they were in on the scam), but by doing so they were sending the country down the drain.
     The residential construction situation gives a good example of this. Back in the 1970s the government financed a lot of middle class housing. In the 1980s controls were set on rent, limiting increases; but to keep the other side happy, mortgage payments were allowed to lag behind inflation. Consequently, both tenants and landlords got a steal, and they both knew it. Who was going to complain? However, eventually the country paid the piper because this policy wiped out the capital invested in housing, and the lack of return meant no further investment. Today there is a 12 million unit housing shortage.
     Right now we just wait and see how much discipline this country can come up with in trying to put its house in order. We're all just sort of waiting for the next seam to rip, so they do another patch-up job. Until they pare down the parasitic bureaucracy here, there's no way anybody is going to control anything. In that sense, the situation here is like the Soviet Union, except that the Soviet bureaucracy (all 18 million of them) is bigger and (if possible) more of a problem. Pretty discouraging to contemplate nonetheless.
     Today is a holiday. Latin Americans are very big on holidays, which give them more time to go to the beach and grouse about how little they have. The general trend is to spend time and effort trying to get the biggest slice of the pie possible, not trying to increase the pie's size. Heaven is a government job: no work, a steady income and access to credit. The Banco do Brazil is the biggest bank in the world in terms of number of employees, but is not even in the top 100 in assets. Petrobras, the state oil company, is another good study in inefficiency. During their recent strike, one worker demand was that the company not be privatized; private management would no doubt have to lay off half of them.
     In another recent scandal, an 81 year old in Rio de Janeiro showed up as receiving US$58,000 a month in retirement pay. As it turned out, he hadn't been receiving anything at all; that money (along with another US$10 million a month) was all disappearing inside that Social Security office every month (imagine how much was disappearing thoughout the Welfare system). Discouraging. But even more so in that nobody will ever be punished for dipping into the public till. Yesterday some people were actually arrested. If they go to jail it will be a true miracle. The attitude about corruption is: "If you can do it, then it's your right". It reminds me of the joke about the moron family: "Mommy, mommmy, Jamie vomited all over the kitchen floor." "Hold on there, I get the big pieces." And in fact, during proceedings investigating charges of corruption, the only party that generally suffers is the one that raised the accusation in the first place. As the present president noted during his campaign, "Only chicken thieves go to jail." He hasn't changed that situation one bit. In Paris there are signs in some stores that capture my mood and that of many Brazilians who have taken wing for less fetid harbors:

This is the Brazil I know and must admit to not loving very much. But this is also where I have met some of the finest people I have ever known. One in particular, you, Gloria, are what this is all about.

     Now on to love. It is often said that you should never talk about past loves with your beloved. I have violated this little rule many times with you and I hope that this time you will understand why I have felt it important enough to cause you the discomfort of introducing you to Pierrina in particular.
     I have been in love twice in its truest sense, the sense that love is one united whole with various expressions that we may hope to participate in but can never control. I first met a lovely young Greek, Pierrina Andritsi, in 1970 and so began my first experience of this unified love -- it continues as always. Love and madness have always mingled their waters in my experience. Love found me during a fit of wrath in a mental hospital during the tortured days of "peace and love" and the Vietnam war, following a high-flying trip to California and the use of rather more drugs (LSD, hashish, marijuana and mescaline) than I could handle.
     Let me tell you about one little incident with LSD. One night in Spring 1969 I took it at Oberlin College and waited to see what might happen. LSD is a powerful, almost overwhelming drug at times; it does not provide a gentle lift like marijuana but rushes through and takes you where it will (that's why the experience became known as "tripping"). That night it eventually took me into a tantric meditation in which I focused energy on my eyes and took them from their normal 5 degrees of myopia to perfect vision for a while. I have never done anything like that before or since. A stunning application of concentration which should give you an idea of what drugs meant to us back in those days. They were a vehicle for challenging the existing order, demonstrating its pretentious explanations and misrepresentations about us and the world and for showing the potential that nature placed in each and every one of us and that we all should be willing to use and to serve.
     The feelings that got me into the hospital in the first place are partially expressed in the following poems written during the period. The originals are long lost and some of what I recall are just fragments, but I think they capture a fair amount of what was going through me:

     Cornell Medical Center, White Plains Division is an institution for the troubled children of the elite. Many of the patients are sons or daughters of millionaires and most are young. I met a girl from Oberlin, my university, there and many others on the same social level. Entry depends on having a good deal of pull (and money). The food is great and the grounds of the place are modelled after Kensington Palace with wide expanses of grass and neat brick buildings. Quite a lovely place. My father went to medical school at Cornell, so there I was.
     When I first arrived, I was interviewed by a group on medical rounds with some visiting students and volunteers and Pierrina was one of them. I remember seeing her and noting her pure presence, such a steady, uncomplicated gaze for one so young. She stood out among the psychiatrists and their students like an oasis in the desert. Then that night when I was writhing in a pseudo-parkinsonism reaction to a heavy dose of a phenothiazine (Thorazine) and feeling like I was at the cross-roads of all my hells, she came to the door and said in her delightful Greek accent: "I've been looking for you!" with a voice like a scolding mother. The pain suddenly disappeared in a miracle and she was with me. And then we were together frequently when she would visit and we became very good friends. I don't think she ever talked to anyone there but me. I can't remember ever needing a friend more and recall being constantly astonished that she was there. You are the first person who has ever touched me as deeply as she did.
     There's a little confusion in my memory about whether we held hands or anything at the hospital -- lots of drug therapy back then. I was deeply in awe of her fresh and open beauty. She said she had spent some time with Gypsies and I could feel the magic of her. I showed her a poem where the sun represented me in some sense and I referred to the sun as "it". She understood the hidden sense of the poem straight away and asked me why it wasn't "he". I recall being out on the grounds with her and her saying she got in trouble for not maintaining a more professional relationship.
     Then there were the letters I wrote to her from NYC where I was working as an inhalation therapist and suffering from a measure of loneliness only New Yorkers (and maybe Paulistanos) can really understand. Beautiful longing letters in sloping script to someone I felt to be beyond words. She responded. I couldn't believe it. Me a former mental patient and she was willing to write. It almost made having been in the hospital worthwhile to have met her.
     When she first came to me in NY I thought I was going to die I was so happy and stunned. The feeling was one of astonished gratitude to reality that this could be happening. She was so courageous and beautiful. I recall that the first time she came my brother stopped by too and we were sitting on the floor, with me holding her ankle.
     Then there was the love making. I guess that in fact I've only really made love to you and to her. Like with you, I felt I could stretch my sense and reach up to heaven with her. The rest of the sex I have known has just been exercise, frustration and disappointment. Then we were together every other weekend for some time. I said I loved her and asked if she loved me too. She said she loved me "a little bit".
     I sometimes felt a little like I was just an interesting psychological case study or something for her. I asked her to marry me but felt I must be kidding. I felt a pretty heavy stigma despite the high status of protestive mental illness during that period of LSD and Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Woodstock (I was there, of course), Timothy Leary, Jim Morrison and all the minor other crazies (like me) who sacrificed themselves to confront the generalized confusion around us. Me, a former patient, wanting the loveliest woman I'd ever known to even think about marrying him was pretty hard to contemplate. I recognized that but I don't think I ever got over the pain of it.
     Then we broke up and I found myself in another hospital. The following song, Death Cry at the Passing of Love, came to me complete, with a woman's softly woeful voice singing it within me. No other poem or song, has ever come to me like that -- just the performance of a song come from God knows what loving spirit to comfort me when death alone appeared a relief. I have never forgotten the tune or the words and still feel gratitude to whoever sang it and brought me this succor.

     My heart broke beyond breaking, with the fissure stretching down below where feeling ceases and on beyond, and never healing, just a crushed mass of pain and a well of self-hatred that I had found someone I loved and was unworthy of her. I had spent my life trying with all that I had to be worthy, to serve openly that which is worth serving; somehow I had failed in the one thing that mattered to me. I was no more. It was not until I met you that anything began to make any sense and feeling began to return to my heart.
     I don't think I've ever admitted how much that pain and loss contributed to a suicide attempt a couple of years later at Oberlin College. I felt like Moses and the promised land: I could see the place and even love it for a little while but I couldn't enter and settle down.
     Another magic moment was some lavender roses I sent to her at Manhattenville College in Purchase, N.Y. and the call I made that somehow got misdirected, chancing to find her walking through a room. She picked up the phone up holding the newly received roses and we were talking.
     I recall a purple and gold velvet sash I took her and an Ankh with two cross-bars I made for her. I said something like, "The two cross bars mean back from life; back from death: the union of being."
     Another notable night was when she was living near the Natural History Museum near Central Park in NYC and we sat in the park after I took LSD. It was quite a sense of a Scottish clan gathering. Then afterwards came some confusion in the NY bus station that I have never quite gotten over either.
     That sleepless night with the LSD still active I found myself alone in the near empty bus terminal amongst drunks and vagrants picking through the garbage. The drug took my feeling out among dinosaurs, perhaps reflecting the depth of my fear (I felt anger and wrath but no fear at the time), and down into mote consciousness somewhere below particle sense, where everything is so cold and plastic that no feelings can exist for long. Feelings only draw the cold and they soon return to being cold too. You open up to another and your warmth is lost. Eventually you learn to bear the cold in your search for someone, something, anything's being there. Any kind of company that did not betray was welcome in that almost all were so cruel and so few proved to be true, like mote-being betrayers that plagued my waking nightmare.
     After that I always felt myself to have so many unsavory elements hidden in my past (particularly the tantric ones) that eventually I huddled up with my recollections and felt inadequate to be with anyone I love. I kept saying in a guilt-ridden confession somewhere within, "But look at these horrible things I have done: I was a pervert for something like a year when I was a preadolescent -- I would put on my mother's old clothes iin the attic, exercised intensely and masturbated (a close parallel to a Tibetan tantric practice¹ for establishing linkage with the feminine essence (shakti or vajra-dakini), though not as well defined and exibiting the dangers potential in the practice of being drawn into its sexual aspect too deeply); I have eaten huge amounts of shit of all kinds -- human, dog, goat, cat, raccoon and heaven knows what else (this will be discussed in detail below); I have been a crazy person filled with wrath and confusion and placed in hospitals (the times were certainly not conducive to stability); I have twice attempted to take my life, once with a razor and once with a hundred and twenty aspirins; I have practiced nature worship, loving trees and spilling my seed on them and in rivers and streams, on the beach and in the ocean (simple practices coming out to many nature worshipping traditions like the Druids, Sutapas and Sufis); I have taken drugs which left me strange indeed; and I have drunk in excess (Brazil had a strong impact on my desire for alcohol -- can't imagine why). How can you be with me, let alone love me?"
     Most of these practices I now know to be directly paralleled in tantric practices (particularly the Tibetan form²) and are simply part of the training. They always say that when the student is ready the master comes; sometimes I guess the master has to come through the student and the student just does what is needed. I certainly got tired of all the wierd behavior but it passed like training periods and then was gone so I didn't spend much time dwelling on it. I was generally just happy it was over.
     I saw Pia again a few years ago and like I told you she was as lovely as ever. She came out with her husband and their child and remains beyond words. She is the only person I had ever met with a direct link to our common sense, the common love that guides us all. She could always read through me like an open book. You also arise there but for a long time you had such a complicated structuring that I really couldn't approve of what you were feeling -- it was too mechanical and controlled and unknowingly angry. Nowadays you have eased your stance, are accepting your life better and have begun to come forth in the sense I feel you. You are and always were lovely in any case, my love, just a bit complicated to communicate with.
     Let my explain some of the other items on that confession list. When I first came to Brazil I was on a shit fast; this is an Indic practice which continues in the sutapa tradition in Java though it is not normally part of Sumarah. I stayed on the fast, consuming small portions of each bowel movement every day for about four years (1980-1984). Nothing is better for burning out the habit of thought and leaving the mind as blank and black as empty space. If you recall I have sometimes told you that I haven't thought for years. It is partially as a result of this long fast.
     Mechanically a shit fast shortens the feedback loop between experience and the response you receive to it in the world around you. Once the response loop gets short enough, thought burns out like phosphorus on water because it is far to slow to keep up with the existential flow. In Javanese terms, a shit fast is the quickest way (except for dying) to shorten the distance between lahir (outer experience) and batin (inner experience). An anthropologist, a good friend who did her fieldwork in India (where this is quite common among holy men) and the only person I have ever confessed this behavior to, asked me about aversion to contact and sex which are well-known in these periods. I could testify that during the initial months the level of intensity so heightened that any contact whatsoever brought on a fiery burning, mostly coming in the upper chakra. Eventually the head chakra itself burns out and the problem ceases.
     There were also some other activities during the shit fast like kungkum³, sitting partially immersed in a stream at night at my parents home in HoHoKus, N.J. or in Chapel Hill, N.C. or in Brazil, when I had the chance, and watching the waters flow over and through you, as well as various other forms of nature worship, some of which were mentioned above. During the shit fast, Pierrina's ka and khaibit⁴ were with me almost constantly. There were some beautiful moments of velvety consciousness in the center of this experiential hell.
     I remember some images and impressions from that time, like being an argonaut on a journey and sitting out in the night with Pia on the porch of Maria's aunt's little house in Guarapari and walking up to a big white house where for some reason I felt Pia must be in some sense and arguing with the sun, while the moon became nubbin, a special sense of Pia's femininity. There was also a great deal about an enormous palace or some such in a heavily wooded area (mostly evergreen) with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of wives. Then there were the days of rage in Guarapari, with the forces of being arrayed around me, and me in the middle trying to get some order established in the competing senses (there was some great being hovering over me -- I don't remember who off-hand). And the spirit of Areia Preta beach, a beautiful womanly sense that lifted me sometimes too. Crazy days indeed, but shit fasts are like that: they bring out all that is hidden between you and the direct sensing of reality.
     Then there was a song, I think it came later, while I was in Vitoria, though not much had changed by that time except that the moot in my consciousness was resolved I guess and I was teaching and living a normal life. Barbra Streisand sang it and it hit me so hard that I still stand in awe of it.

The years passed. Eventually we moved to São Paulo. The need for the shit fast passed since pure spontaneity was now present. Translation work began and life became a bit less unpleasant. My heart was still a source of continuous black pain but I was used to it and it didn't bother me much.

And then there was you and my heart began to beat with feeling again. I had spent all those years with a dead heart rather wondering if nature was so cruel that pain simply dies with you and you go on with it to the next life, because nothing I had ever done in this one had even touched on the agony, let alone relieved it. I just lived with it and marched on hopelessly doing my best to do whatever was right as a husband, a father and a human being, but with very little real interest in any of it.

With another love, came another song: I've written only two love songs in my life for there have been only two loves in my life.

Confused Awakening December 1991
for Gloria Isma'ili
Dear, you mend my saddened soul
And make it hard to sleep;
I lie awake in bed at night
Listening to my heart beat.

Close to now in loving you
All I am breaks open wide,
And love comes out so soft and pure
I don't know how to hide.

Come what may my dearest dear,
My heart is here with you.
How to serve you, Gloria?
How best to be with you?

Now let me introduce the elements you are probably going to find pretty new. This kind of worldview is common in Java⁵but I have never placed anybody here in terms of it before. I can't help it; this it the way I see existence and it strikes me as equally strange that Western society closes its eyes so tightly to the obvious. There is not another culture in the history of the world with such an absurdly materialistic and egotistical perspective on being and very few social orders have worked so actively to destroy themselves as a result.

Thales, one of the early Greek philosophers, observed that "all things are full of gods," i.e., often overlapping ordered unions of consciousness serving large visions where participation varies according to both agreement with the common defining purpose and the details of its implementation. To a greater or lesser degree, any participant in such a union acts in accord with its purposes and characteristics, expressing its existential, experiential basis, i.e., that which draws beings to participate in it in the first place. The basis of such unions is invariably love and justice though there are significant variations in the amount of emphasis on the one or the other element. The links defining such unions are affective and understanding them presupposes an appreciation of the shared nature of experience: we all here together, sharing reality, and our affective experience consequently reflects our position relative to the whole.
There is a good deal of material describing the mechanisms involved in these processes in Homer and other ancient Greek sources⁶. This same sense is prominent in the Greek plays of the Athenian tradition.

Every man is faced with the task of dealing with both his emotions and his intellect. It is perhaps symptomatic of this age that we have a difficult time integrating the two and that part of the difficulty comes out of a fear of the basic drives that make us up...Until man comes to unbury and understand the primitive forces that at least partially define him, he is the slave of their denial. These plays are important because it is in Greece that Western Civilization has its most eloquent link with its tribal origins. It was in Greece that their burial in confusion and contradiction was most clearly observed. Perhaps it is in Greece that we should begin our search for a resolution to our own dilemma mayhaps to still the death cry of our link with the emotional wisdom of our primitive heritage.

     Like any consistent grouping, these "orders" or unions (something along the lines of professional organizations in their basic nature in that there is a degree of mutual selection involved in becoming a doctor or whatever as well) develop organizational structures based on their objectives: the great purpose being served calls up participants and there is inherent order reflected in the agreement of any given perspective within the union with its essential character. These organizations tend to be subliminal and rather corporate in structure. Results often compete with essentials in defining leadership patterns and there is a great deal of pain involved in sorting out purposes and praxis. As a result, many unions develop active and passive leadership structures or godheads, with the former being more pragmatic and less closely linked to the essential nature of the union and the latter being more deeply founded in the substance defining it and worried about its purity.
     A godly order is necessarily an open sense, though guaranteeing its essence often involves protective structuring to shield the expression of its raison d'etre, i.e., its defining love and purpose. The loss of linkage with this purpose results in die gotterdamerung (the fall of the gods) and the partial dissolution and "occultation" of the order that served and expressed the sense. Eventually the love regathers and a specific die gotterzusamenung (the joining of the gods) arises if the feeling has not been more effectively incorporated in one of Nature's other high orders.
     Nature safeguards its high beings even when their more active expression is reduced. These are the various heavens so well described in the Buddhist tradition.
     As far as my sensing of you and Pierrina are concerned, you are both also part of nature's maintenance of essential senses, though both of you form part of unions whose local expression is rather reduced.
     Pia is silent kernel of Het-heru or Hathor, one of the oldest and most carefully articulated goddesses. As Het-heru she expresses a nymphish loving sense, reflecting fantastic amounts of faith. She always makes me feel so well-known and is always watching at no distance because she maintains no defenses. She has a long predominantly sister/daughter relationship with you. I haven't had a dream with her for months but when I first came to Brazil she accompanied me just about continuously. She brought me some of the most beautiful dreams I've ever seen. I don't know how she worked through the confusion. Peace was hard to find back then during the shit fast.
     You are silent kernel of Ma'at, the great sense of loving justice that underpins existence itself. You knowingly or unknowingly (I don't know how much you are aware of sometimes but you act consistently in line with your responsibilities) keep track of its energies, concerns and knowledge. The Ma'at Divine Order is coupled with Tehuti; it is the love that guides the knowledge that Tehuti gathers.
     We will now be on a comfortable path that works through some of the upper heavens and is relatively quiet as well. Your green aural sheen (my aural vision was checked in Java and is keen) now says that we will have a lot of peace and eventual offspring (we're not talking about this life now). I honestly don't know what their nature will be because the line progresses without any breaks or dips, meaning that the learning curve for the progeny is almost flat, there is no apparent disunion within the being: I've never seen this vibrant shade of green before but it seems to have more fertile density than is possible to explain. There is a clear ripple effect involved.
     A ripple density effect comes when a larger than fits being is placed within a limited aura. It has to double and fold time within it to condense within the presence. The rippling gives the general aura a color variation like tiny waves of time's waters doubling themselves up to occupy less space and allow a broader vision to enter into a restricted space. The ripples can be more or less prominent depending on how big a size difference there is between the participants. The ripple sense I'm getting in this seems to extend from the outer to the innermost stretches of the being. It's as if it were condensing itself within to allow me to view it and my being is just so small that it ripples the whole thing. The green is a growing green. It is the early spring leaf green. The waves stretch out all around, like looking at a great dappled green ocean from high up that carries on clear and constant to a clear rim of light blue that finally enfolds the whole around the horizon. Unbelievably beautiful. I've never seen anything like it so I won't venture to analyze it, however, Gloria, the coloration is the best possible. There is a hint of this same green on beyond the rim of blue, so perhaps there is a series of gigantic waves involved. This would be consistent. I am lucky in that my inner eye is pretty heavily screened and none of the inner view much influences or affects me. You get used to it.
     Moving my gaze to my heart, nowadays I feel you all the time, love. I hope that you're finally beginning to feel me in some consistent depth. My sense of you is that you have always been with me, though. I do not feel any shifts, though I am subject to a great deal of jealousy about you.
     Looking back at my childhood, a time I feel that you were already with me in some sense, my parents method of raising us relieved me of a problem that is so often apparent here in Brazil, the problem of inlays⁸, i.e., exaggerated emotional reactions taught or imposed on children in early childhood. Brazilian childrearing techniques use more of this than I have ever seen anywhere else. Children are constantly being presented with a highly distorted version of reality as their parents darkly threaten, "Va dormir" (Go to sleep) as if they were being punished or in danger of a beating if they do not.
     I would argue that this distorted emotional foundation is what gives Brazil its jeitinho character, as adults continue defying the threats and fears of childhood and keep showing that they were all nonsense to make themselves feel more important. As a result, the society never really relates to reality, but rather is always reacting to inlays and proving that the fear that they induced isn't real and that the people who induced the fear were wrong. There is a vicious circle involved in this because in their never-ending angry protest against their own emotional abuse as children, adults treat their own children the same way and pass on the tradition to the next generation. It constitutes the same kind of continuing family behavioral pattern as child beating.
     Anyway, my family goes to the other extreme and has always maintained a relationtional system with its children based on absolute respect: "If you are called to do it and are willing to pay the price, go right ahead." Just as in Java, the child is never subjected to any exaggerated distortions of reality, there were no great scoldings about small matters and no boogey-man.
     The basis of this is my family's faith that whatever God or Nature leads us to do, if handled with proper respect and calm and allowed to work itself out will eventually show itself to be al Mahdi ("rightly guided"). The term comes from Islam and my family is not Muslim but they certainly practice a form of "surrender to God's will" in their child-rearing practices.
     I recall when I last went back to the States and was staying with my sister's family, I found, much to my embarassment, that I had adopted some Brazilian "chato" (impositional) attitudes and was trying to impose feelings on people a little bit (for example, I was calling my nephews "kids" in a way that came across as deprecating). In my family such behavior constitutes a stunning lack of respect and violation of trust and I was treated as something of a pariah until I learned to stop doing it again: I could not be trusted to be close and had become a stranger. You are the first Brazilian I have found who is not chata, you do not impose feelings on others and do not present your opinions as the truth but rather carefully define them as your perspective on it. You treat Beryl beautifully. Welcome to my family, love.
     Maria and her whole family are extremely chata and I have had lots of long arguments with her about her attempts to distort Jennifer's worldview by exaggerating or misrepresenting in order to get her to cooperate or behave. There are lots and lots of examples but one recent one came when they had an argument and Jennifer hit her playfully. Maria's response was, "Don't you know that when a child hits her mother her arm shrivels up?!?" Good God! Obviously Jennifer is now old enough to let such nonsense go its own way, but I have been fighting this kind of emotional blackmail and irresponsibility Jennifer's entire life with her mother. Whenever Jennifer goes to the States and comes back clear of the anger this generates, the subject always comes up again. (Gloria, just look at your own experience with your father for an excellent example of how inlays can cause confusion and prolonged, virtually unrelievable pain in that they become a part of a person's character structure to some extent).
     However, beyond the family there are many other people in the world who would like you to believe and fear and think their way. Such influences range from the church to the schools to the police to politicians to your own friends and family, all of whom are anxious to have you agree with what they tell you even though we all know none of it is really true in a pure sense, and most of it is just nonsense. This indoctrination is made more difficult by having a great deal of pain during the period when inlays are normally implanted or adopted by a child (4-6 years of age), depending on whether there is an effort to place such a belief structure or if it is just a generalized illusion you are invited to participate in.

     To protect myself from this indoctrination beyond the family sanctuary of categorical respect, which meant there was almost no family attempt to implant or impose a distorted perspective, I declared war on yellow jackets (family Vespidae) when I was about five years old.
     These wasps (vespas) lived in the stone walls along our driveway in large colonies and are a minor nuisance if you're eating something sweet or buttery (they love pop corn) and they are around. I used to take a cloth and wet it and go out and kill them by whipping them with the wet cloth. I must have killed dozens and been stung many, many times over a period of seven or eight months. Believe me they have an excrutiating sting.
     As a result, I learned to ignore pain and to consider it a normal part of living: nothing to get excited about or to try to avoid. For example, when I went to a doctor for an injection and he would be offering me candy to make me willing to let him give me the shot, but I would literally laugh at him and the pain in that it was so insignificant (my family considered this a little strange).
     According to the Javanese, I was "polishing my soul" on the yellow jackets -- using them to teach myself a vital lesson, that life is filled with pain and that one cannot avoid it but must do what is right or necessary despite it.
     Since then any attempts to systematize me within any mentality or mind-set whatever have had to use overlay⁹ and other intrusion¹⁰ techniques and I was able to manage a response to them while maintaining my fundamental love, my ab, free. This is one of the reasons I have had so few problems with some of the atypical behavior and training I have been through: I did not have an inlay structure judging me.

As far as I can tell, strange as it may sound, Gloria, I remember you¹¹. I remember your sense together with me when I was a child. You take me back to times and places, events and feelings from my childhood when you were with me. The fullest sense came when we were five or so and I find that same grace, that same communion once again in you. That was shortly before my fall from every child's sense of absolute rightness, when the pretentions of local custom still had no influence on my feelings and I wandered naked and defiant in the warm and innocent sun. Often when I think of you it takes me back to special times when I was a child alone but together with someone, someone who was there but was not apparent, someone I loved so much that my life could not be separated from her even for one moment. For example, I recall feeling you so often, like while I was looking out the window of my bedroom at our big maple tree and again when I was in bed playing prince in some fancy new pyjamas: somehow you were always there like you are here now.
I have known your feeling throughout my life, Gloria. The only thing I did not know was if I would ever meet you. Everywhere I went, and especially when things were hardest, you were always there. When I first saw you with your defenses down, when I first held you in my arms, everything went totally relaxed inside me. My breathing came out like one crying from relief. That is why I would so often smile when you scolded me, because you had scolded me so often before and now I was finally there to hear it. May God be Praised, for this is the depth of the love I feel for you. You are my ever constant companion, my ever present sense that goes on beyond where I can make sense of anything and remains there with me, looking back at where we have been and on to what is to come.

1. Cf. Tibetan tantric Buddhism's "The Path of Transference: The Yoga of Consciousness-Transference," especially in "The Visualizing of Vajra-Dakini (the highest female principle) in W.Y.Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, Oxford, 1935, pp.253-276.

4. Egyptian Notion of Psychic/Spiritual Mechanism and Organization Giving A Clearer Notion Of Non-structured Psychic Functioning Wherein The Being Is Openly Defined.

5. Cf. Seri Kebatinan Baboning Kitab Primbon and particularly Sang Indrajati's Kitab Wedha Mantra as well as the works of Harnopidjati and the Semar group.

7. David G. Howe, "From a Greek Vein", unpublished manuscript, c. 1972, pp. 1-2.

8. Inlays are conditioned experiential responses that become basically independent of the source and thus require very little further energy after they have been set up. Inlays involve a kind of echo structuring with the subject being placed between two sides of the same response and eventually assuming the response itself to be his/her own. This kind of emotional conditioning (generally involving exaggerated fear) is rather hard to undo because it becomes a part of the personality and is generally imposed early on in the child's life in order to control the child's behavior and get him/her to adopt the "normal" local perspective on reality.

9. Overlays are experiential impositions of a temporary and rather active nature which can be positive or negative in character (properly used these are the mechanisms involved in "checking" and "bearing", see David G. Howe, Sumarah: A Study of the Art of Living for a detailed description of the techniques and their uses, pp. 161-165). Improperly used, overlays imply an emotional touch with the person's local sense which can be contentious and require a fair amount of energy to be maintained. An intrusion can be traced if it is maintained too long and the experiential content returned to the defining spirit. If the intrusion is excessively abrupt and strong, it can require screening in order to pretend its own non-existence. This can get very expensive in energy terms. Overlays are frequently used in energy collection systems of a large size in order to collect information and quell budding opposition to the use being made of the energy or protests of a more general character (totalitarian regimes in general use this kind of terror structuring in maintaining themselves, generating and using fear as a means of self-justification -- when you're on the top, e.g., Saddam Hussein, the fear you cause in those around you feels quite pleasant in its own sick way). When used as a conditioning device, the cost is prohibitive and if much voltage or repetition is required, Natural Law will step in and quiet the disturbance.

10. Impositions are generic for inlays, overlays and all other types of experiential manipulation practices. These can range from the more obvious sense shifts witnessed in emotional contact as in the spectators of a sports event or a movie to far more complicated sense definitions often found in family relationships, "I'm cold, put on a coat dear." In Javanese families and my own, these impositions are kept to a minimum basically because they involve prohibitively expensive long- and short-term consequences. By interfering with reality recognition, impositions raise the kind of confusion you get in Brazilian society and an inevitable protest through Natural Law.

11. This is one of the places that the Egyptian (or Javanese for that matter) notion of the psyche and deep relations maintained and served over time is useful. It's not easy to account for my love for you in Western thought unless you're willing to go through some of C.G. Jung's work like his introductions to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Secret of the Golden Flower, and even so you end up with a rather schematized picture of reality rather than the simple relationships and patterns of interaction contained in the material he was commenting on.